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An innovative new study of the concept of ´character´ in literature, films and comics that draws upon a more personal and reflective mode of literary criticism.

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What if the Renaissance had the right idea about character? Most readers today think that characters are individuals. Poets of the Renaissance were working with an ancient understanding of character as type. They thought the job of a character was to collect every example of a kind.
Character as Form celebrates the old meaning of character. The advantage of the old meaning is that it allows for generalization. Characters funnel whole societies of beings into shapes that are compact, elegant, and portable.
Reading backwards, using a personal canon of poems, novels, comics, and performances in theater and film, this book tests the old meaning of character against modern examples. The heart of the book is the character of the misanthrope, who, in Shakespeare´s phrase, "banishes the world."

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Introduction
1. Many Is Not More than One
2. Banish the World
3. What Fiction Means
4. The Wish to Be an Object
Acknowledgments
Works Cited
Index

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Kunin, Aaron
Aaron Kunin is Associate Professor of English, Pomona College, USA. He is the author of two books of poetry, Folding Ruler Star: Poems (2005) and The Sore Throat and Other Poems (2010) and a novel, The Mandarin (2008).

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